What Is Growth Marketing?

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth Marketing. Growth Hacking.  Performance Marketing.  Digital Marketing. 

All of these are used interchangeably, and it causes so much confusion.

So here is a short definition of growth marketing to set the record straight.

Growth marketing is about optimizing for whatever a business deems the key metrics in its funnel. The goal of growth marketing is relatively simple: improved engagement and conversion metrics throughout the marketing funnel. So in essence, growth marketing is about acquiring users from the top of the funnel all the way to retaining those users.

To be clear growth marketing tries to improve results throughout the entire customer purchasing journey funnel in a way that is both sustainable and long-term

Growth hacking, on the other hand, tends to focus on one particular point in the customer journey, using one particular tactic, conventional or not, to try and increase adoption in a way that may work once but is not guaranteed to work subsequently.

Here are some other terms that are often confused with growth marketing, but have some clear differences.

• Performance marketers: These specialists only work on paid channels, most often paid social  — on channels like Facebook Ads — and search engine marketing (SEM). They typically don't work with email, content, or other channels — whereas growth marketers will test out any channel.

• Digital marketing managers: These marketers often lead the marketing function in small companies. As such, they are generalists — writing blog posts, sending customer emails, and running paid campaigns. They think holistically about the company and its growth but are far less data and metrics-driven than growth marketers.

• Demand generation marketers: These are the closest to a growth marketer of these three options listed above.  However, they typically focus more narrowly on top-of-funnel activity, like attracting leads and customers.

Traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel, often with activities that drive short-term wins. 

 But growth marketing, specifically, requires you to focus on the funnel. Growth marketers are data-driven pros who work tirelessly to find innovative ways to drive user acquisition, keep customers engaged, retain them, and ultimately turn them into brand champions.

In other words, growth marketers are master experimenters at every stage of the funnel. And they work closely with the whole business to gain better insights.

What are some of the core components of a Growth Marketing-based Approach?

A growth marketing strategy can be based on metrics including customer acquisition, conversion, retention, and lifetime value. Here are some of the leading tactics that today's growth marketers use to attract, convert, create, and retain engaged customers. These tactics are used frequently in the e-commerce space but can be just as useful for businesses that rely on leads (ex; SaaS) and brick-and-mortar businesses, as well as many others.

1) A/B testing

A/B testing, or better yet, multivariate testing, is one of the core practices of a strong growth marketing strategy. A/B testing and multivariate can be used in a number of formats, including email marketing, landing pages, social media ads, and others. This involves deploying either an "A" and a "B" test, or a series of multiple tests, to understand which variation of your content (with customizations around graphics, copy, design, and other features) does a better job of engaging your audience and increasing your conversion rate. You can then optimize future marketing campaigns around that variation—continually iterating on your successes to enhance performance with every test. It's important to remember that just because the "B" test proved most effective with one audience segment, "C" might work better with another: Don't just send your A/B tests out in batches; focus on customized segments for each one to understand what content resonates with that particular audience group, and then keep testing new variations to enhance performance.

2) Cross-channel marketing

Cross-channel marketing focuses on building a strategic channel plan to reach your customers, and can include email marketing, SMS messaging, push notifications, in-app messages, direct mail, and other channels, based on your audience’s preferences. When incorporating a cross-channel marketing plan into your growth marketing strategy, you need to focus on the individual user to understand their communication preferences, and then build your campaigns accordingly. A/B testing can help you first understand that a particular user responds to push message offers at a 60% higher rate than email marketing offers, for instance, so you can customize future campaigns to focus on push offers. It's also valuable to build a holistic marketing plan that integrates multiple channels so that you will be able to engage with your audience wherever they are, using contextual campaigns that help you understand their past behavior across each platform.

3) Customer lifecycle

A customer lifecycle is a journey your customers embark on as they learn about, interact with, buy or convert, and re-engage with your company. For simplification, there are three critical lifecycle stages that growth marketers focus on: activation, nurture, and reactivation. Each stage plays a specific role as a contributing factor to customer experience and is often marked by specific campaigns.

The activation stage is the initial stage of the lifecycle where companies seek to activate consumer attention and interest. Growth marketers target customers with welcome, onboarding, trials, and other introductory campaigns to build familiarity and credibility.

The nurture stage is where companies nurture and engage consumers to strengthen relationships. This stage typically accounts for the majority of cross-channel marketing customers receive from brands: sales, promotions, recent updates, newsletters, and more.

The final reactivation stage focuses on re-engagement. It’s this stage where companies reactivate customer engagement to drive retention and loyalty through campaigns like: post-purchase, abandonment, loyalty, or win backs.

No single stage outweighs another in terms of importance. Customers naturally progress through this lifecycle at their own speed, but growth marketers proactively accommodate their changing needs using an arsenal of need-specific campaigns.

4) Top of the funnel engagement

What you do to increase brand awareness and streamline the early steps of acquisition set the tone for your entire growth marketing strategy. For most companies, this means solidifying your online or social presence and maintaining a stellar website.

Plan experiments and gather data surrounding:

• Frequency of posting on different social platforms

• Types of posts that are most effective on different social platforms (videos vs. photos as well as blog posts vs. case studies)

• Engagement using infographics versus videos or other media

• Effectiveness of different headlines or button CTAs on landing pages

• Your team’s response time to new form submissions

• Response rates to emails and texts containing the same information

5) Lead nurturing

When dealing with acquisition, it’s not just about lead generation. Your lead nurturing needs to really shine so that you build relationships, get the right people buying, and then keep them engaged.

You need more responses from prospects and less ghosting for appointments. To accomplish both of those things and close more sales, you’ll want to:

• Track your team’s response times for all conversations with prospects

• Pay attention to response rates to different types of messages — when they’re sent, what they say, how long they are, etc.

• Test different cadences for appointment reminders and post-meeting follow-up.

• Try different combinations of texts, calls, and emails.

Basic steps to implement growth marketing at your company

Fully embracing growth marketing is no small thing. It’s going to take a lot of time to get your specific process dialed in. Here’s a basic four-step process for implementing growth marketing that you can tailor to your business needs.

1. Research and identify areas of improvement

Discover the aspects of the customer lifecycle that you want to improve or change. This may either be out of necessity or simply because there’s always potential to do more.

Do you want more people upgrading within your app? Are onboarding emails not being opened? Your process for requesting reviews seems to be stalled? All of these are valid business questions you might find yourself considering.

2. Plan and develop quantifiable experiments

Prep your tests surrounding the areas of improvement. What and how you test will vary. A/B testing is going to be a huge part of this step. You have to set up what exactly you want to test and what variables matter.

At this point, you also need to know how you’re going to track what you test and where that data will be stored. What parts of the tracking process will be automated or manual? How will people access it? What factors will determine the winner? How long will you run your test?

3. Execute your experiments and gather data

Put everything into action! How long you run your tests varies based on what you hope to find out. You need to do them long enough to actually prove something one way or another. Certain tests yield results fast and others will go for a while.

If you’re working on an SEO project for example, that’s not likely to be done in a couple of weeks. But if you’re testing the effectiveness of two CTAs on your pricing page and you get thousands of visitors a day, you’ll get actionable results much faster.

4. Analyze results and data to make future choices

In many cases, you’ll be following along closely with your data as it comes in. That’s important! But make sure you take the time to fully analyze everything within the full context of your test.

Everything you glean from your data should then inform future sales and marketing decisions. Sometimes this means knowing how to plan a better test in the future, or even that the variables you thought mattered were not important. Trial and error rules!

Seem overwhelming? Yeah, that’s fair. Break down each of these four steps and don’t try to plan experiments for every stage of the customer lifecycle all at once. Choose one or two of the “pirate metrics” to focus on and then plan/execute very specific tests as you go through the learning process.